The rusty hectic died out. The night came along in a clear dusk with a faint sighing of wind over the raft every time the swell threw her up. There was a silver curl of moon in the south-west, but she was without power to drop so much as a flake of her light into the dark shadow of water under her. Yet the starlight was in the gloom, and it was not so dark but that I could see Helga's face in a sort of glimmer, and the white outline of the cot and the configuration of the raft upon the water in dusky strokes. The barque floated at about a cable's length distant from us, a dark mass, rolling in a strangling manner, as I might know by the sickly slide of the stars in the squares of her rigging and along the pallid lines of the canvas stowed upon her yards. There was more tenacity of life in her than I should have believed possible, and I said to Helga: 'If this raft were a boat, I would board the barque and set her on fire. She may float through the night, for who is to know but that one of her worse leaks may have got choked, and the blaze she would make might bring us help.' The Captain uttered some exclamation in Danish, in a small but vehement and shrill tone. He had not spoken for above an hour, and I had believed him sleeping or dying and speechless. 'What does he say?' I called across softly to Helga. 'That the _Anine_ might have been saved had we stood by her,' she answered, struggling, as I could hear by the tremor in her voice, to control her accents. 'No, no!' said I, almost gruffly, I fear, with the mood that was upon me of helplessness, despair, and the kind of rage that comes with perception that one is doomed to die like a rat, without a chance, without a soul of all those one loves knowing one's fate. 'No, no!' I cried, 'the _Anine_ was not to be saved by us two, nor by twenty like us, Helga. _You_ know that--for it is like making me responsible for our situation here to doubt it.' 'I do not doubt it,' she answered firmly and reproachfully. Captain Nielsen muttered in his native tongue; but I did not inquire what he said, and the hush of the great ocean night, with its delicate threading of complaining wind, fell upon us.